Like emerging from a fog. That’s how I’d describe the passed month.
Anxieties about my health have finally moved from the front of my mind to…well, somewhere less prominent. After fourteen months of chasing a mystery illness that had me seeing a handful of specialists and struggling with pain, last month we finally found what was plaguing me: a slipped rib.
It’s hard to concentrate when you’re in pain. The feeling of being imprisoned with something unknown and inescapable stirs up the anxiety; there’s no running away from both the body and the mind. I’m left with a new perspective on illness, and empathy for those around me who struggle each and everyday (sometimes silently).
Along with the improvements in health and mood has been an uptick in my willingness to sit in the evening and get back to watching movies. And I feel like I did a lot of that joyfully this month.
Here’s five good movies listed in the order I watched them.
BLIND (2014)
Watching The Worst Person in the World, I made it a mission to watch all of director Joachim Trier’s other films. Exhausting that short list of four films (why couldn’t it be longer!?), I turned then to Trier’s writing partner, Eskil Vogt. This, his directorial debut, felt narratively adventurous in a way that left me questioning what was fact and what was fiction as the credits rolled - and that’s not a bad thing. Funny, smart, sexy. I’ll be excited to see his second film The Innocents when it is released by IFC Midnight (hopefully later this year).
THE HUNT
With Another Round standing out as my favorite film of 2020, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the team of Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm had made an equally as impressive film. Like Another Round, these writers take on another difficult subject (here, accusations of child sexual abuse) and interrogate the subject to find numerous nuances overlooked by brief examination. Yet again, it’s Mads Mikkelsen who steals the show and never fails to surprise me when he breaks open revealing the deep pain in his characters.
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS
I find it fascinating how the best of films can leave such an indelible mark on me even when so many details begin to fade from memory. The emotional weight and fleeting visuals can linger even as the full story drops away and invites a rewatch. This is one of them. Cristian Mungiu’s film centers on Otilia, a university student tasked with helping her friend Gabriela navigate receiving an illegal abortion in Communist Romania. Watching the film for this second time, I was struck not only by the scenes I remembered watching as a film student in 2008, but by those I had not. Ten years from now, I imagine the dinner scene will still play in my mind.
BEYOND THE VISIBLE: HILMA AF KLINT
Early in Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper, Kristen Stewart’s character, a spiritual medium, is told to seek out interviews about the artist Hilma Af Klint. For an extended sequence, Kristen Stewart watches videos about her on an iPhone. But, the subject is dropped. So be it, but it renewed my interest in seeing this documentary, and I'm so glad it did. This was such an enjoyable surprise this month. Abstract art has never really been my thing, but here is a documentary that helped instill an interest and a new curiosity. A film about spirituality, science, the limits of human perception, and the corruption/omissions of art history, amongst so much else. A real treat, and historical corrective.
WESTERN (2018)
Maybe because it’s freshest in my mind, but this was my movie of the month. Using and twisting the conventions of American Westerns, this German film follows a group of German construction workers on assignment building a dam in the southwestern “frontier” of Bulgaria. The film focuses on Meinhard, a tall and weathered worker (whom may or may not have been a mercenary) as he ingratiates himself with the locals and slowly alienates his own countrymen and coworkers. A tense movie that raises questions about ownership, community, and the European Union, I was most enthralled with long sequences focused on language barriers and connections that ended up relying more on hand gestures and intonations than words.
For more suggestions, check out my NOW list, tracking everything I’m watching this year.
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